Hang up your Brightest Colours
by ColonelDespard
Summary: They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man - The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.


"_**Don't let them make you miserable about it: how could a born soldier die better?...I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death. So tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colors in his honor; and let us all praise God that he did not die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived." **_  
(George Bernard Shaw on the death of Michael Collins)

********

The drums rattled a dry martial air in the cold autumn sunlight. Grantaire, anonymous in the throng, watched as the slim, erect figure of a young man mounted the stairs to stand in front of the sharply functional geometric form of the guillotine. Scaffold, guillotine, and stairs – all were raw cut, splintering wood, harshly new. Arms pinioned to his sides, golden hair cropped roughly to a remnant that left the shape of his perfectly proportioned skull with its lofty brow exposed. Grantaire's breath caught at the sight of the bare and vulnerable neck, collarless, shirt unbuttoned and drawn down to expose the nape, ready for the blade.

The guards grabbed the prisoner's arms roughly – he straightened even more, but did not resist. Poised, not an animal at bay, the chin high, the blazing blue of his eyes sweeping the scene ("be sensible, Grantaire" a voice interrupted this thoughts, "you could not see the color of his eyes from this distance…" "…ah, true – but I would recall it…"). The crowd, riotous elements vocal in their disapproval, and others voicing mockery and jeers, grew quiet in expectation. Would the victim speak? Or would he make a Spartan death of it? Surely the latter.

"A thousand nations have achieved earthly greatness," said a clear, precise voice, "that could never have endured good laws; even such as could have endured them could have done so only for a very brief period of their long history. Most peoples, like most men, are docile only in youth; as they grow old they become incorrigible. When once customs have become established and prejudices inveterate, it is dangerous and useless to attempt their reformation; the people, like the foolish and cowardly patients who rave at sight of the doctor, can no longer bear that any one should lay hands on its faults to remedy them."

Odd – he could swear the lips of the man on the scaffold were not moving. But the voice was his. Really – as scaffold speeches went, it wasn't very pithy. And it seemed familiar.

They turned the unbowed man on the scaffold from the crowd, and with ungentle hands strapped him to the bascule, which arced him down to a prone position. The lunette clamped down on the bare neck. How quick – how efficient.

Grantaire caught a slight flurry of movement, a signal, and down came the blade with leaden heaviness. There was a pause – tremendous gout of blood – then mixed cheers and hisses as the crowd surged forward…

"…There are indeed times in the history of States when, just as some kinds of illness turn men's heads and make them forget the past, periods of violence and revolutions do to peoples what these crises do to individuals: horror of the past takes the place of forgetfulness, and the State, set on fire by civil wars, is born again, so to speak, from its ashes, and takes on anew, fresh from the jaws of death, the vigor of youth. Such were Sparta at the time of Lycurgus, Rome after the Tarquins, and, in modern times, Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of the tyrants."

Now, really, thought Grantaire. Those will not do for final words. I'm sure you've plagiarized them from somewhere, and that's not like you. And anyway, your head is off now…

"Good, good –" came a second voice. "And the next paragraph would fit in beautifully with the theme: 'But such events are rare; they are exceptions, the cause of which is always to be found in the particular constitution of the State concerned. They cannot even happen twice to the same people, for it can make itself free as long as it remains barbarous, but not when the civic impulse has lost its vigor. Then disturbances may destroy it, but revolutions cannot mend it: it needs a master, and not a liberator. Free peoples, be mindful of this maxim: "Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered."' We may need to condense it for the audience, though."

"Agreed, Combeferre, although I do not like to speak down to the working men. I think they can take Rousseau in his pure form."  
Grantaire raised his head from the table, the bristle of his beard scraping across the wood grain. His head felt heavy, so he rested it on his hand as he looked to the corner of the room where Combeferre grinned at his friend. "Well, if anyone can carry them through a few hours worth of unadulterated Social Contract, it would be you, Enjolras. Just remember that time listening to you takes from what few leisure hours they have." Enjolras nodded an acknowledgement, and the two heads turned back down to the pages spread between them, running through the work line by line. Grantaire was relieved to not see the shorn locks he had conjured.

It had not been a dream, but it had had the immediacy of a not-too-distant memory. An imagining he had as little conscious control over as a dream, his mind filling in the sounds, the smell of rank humanity around him and the metallic blood in the air.

"Morbid," he muttered to himself, giving himself a small shake as if that could dispel the lingering images. Morbid, and most unworthy of that most unmorbid of creatures sitting across the room. It seemed blasphemous to think of death and that dazzling brightness in connection. He reached for someone's bottle of Margaux close by his elbow – there was a half-hearted "Hey!" from Joly, but really, what could one reasonably expect if one put a bottle in his way? There was no other indication that anyone was aware he had rejoined them.

"That's done!" Courfeyrac, seated at the end of his table, tossed down his pen with a laugh. "There's your promised translation, Feuilly – I have delivered. Now you can fire your imagination with the idea of granting but three of the three hundred to make a new Thermopylae in Greece, while I shall take my leave of you good gentlemen – I plan to pass my evening with softer, if no less convivial, company."

This was met with a few ribald sallies that Courfeyrac met with good grinning humor, rising to his feet. "Don't forget, Jehan, you promised to translate that Greek piece in payment for the poem for Feuilly. I'll need it for next week's classes. Enjolras won't lend me his work on it –" here Enjolras's long, elegant hand could be seen to wave dismissively back over his shoulder, though he himself did not look up. Courfeyrac shook his head, still smiling. "I'll see you and Combeferre tomorrow at the polytechnic for that little gathering, Enjolras."

"Take care, Courfeyrac – and we shall see you tomorrow" said Enjolras, finally looking up and twisting to face them, with a slight turning up at the corners of his mouth that might be a smile.

Grantaire's eyes fell on Enjolras's neck. He felt a little pang, and realized that it was relief in seeing the younger man's cravat was knotted high up under his chin, with no flesh of the neck showing.

********

Grantaire caught up with Courfeyrac in the corridor as the law student shifted his shoulders into his greatcoat and set his hat at just the right angle on his head.

"I'm not looking for company," he told Grantaire pleasantly. "Nina, alas, has no pretty sisters, cousins or other available female companions for you, and I take it from your early departure from the Musain that your pockets are empty and you are therefore unable to afford a theatre seat with us."

"Just a walk with you, my friend – I'll find company at the Souci, and no shortage of pretty sisters, cousins and other available female friends."

Courfeyrac jerked his head back towards the Musain as they began to walk. "Les Amis not to your taste tonight, eh? I admit, I felt a bit too restless to help Feuilly with his poem. He's been on the subject of Greece for weeks – I'm looking forward to some development in Poland, or at least a new partisan song to interest him. You'd have liked the poem, though – plenty of Samian wine swilling around, even if it's dashed to the ground in the end.

"A waste of good wine" grunted Grantaire. "I save all dramatic gestures involving glasses and bottles until after I've drained them. Although one must concede the aesthetics of a smash of red wine and glittering glass against a whitewashed wall."

"Come, out with it – what's on you mind, Grantaire? I saw the looks you cast Enjolras tonight. And I swear I saw you moved to approach him once. Did he say something to you before I arrived? He must have been unusually curt to have you acting like a whipped cur around him."

This was why Grantaire sought Courfeyrac for his confidences. And why, he knew, others would touch his friend for a small loan, advice on the cut of a coat or how to respond to a letter from reproachful parents. He bore confidences well, with neither the solemnity of some, or (what was just as bad) the slighting indifference or amusement of others. Grantaire had few serious confidences he wished to bestow, but Courfeyrac was almost inevitably the recipient of those few.

"Have you ever imagined something with the vividness of a memory? Consciously conjured a vision with such detail that it seemed startlingly true, as if it might have already happened?"

Courfeyrac sighed. This was clearly not going to be a request for a sou or two towards tomorrow's breakfast. "I don't know. Haven't thought about it. I imagine things, but they never seem like visions in the order of Cassandra, if that's what you mean. Is that the cause of your baleful looks at our company tonight?"

"I saw Enjolras die." Grantaire said bluntly. Courfeyrac gave a low whistle. "Not once. At the guillotine, facing down a baying mob. On top of a barricade, a shot drilled through his skull. Neat bullet hole in the forehead, the exit blowing away the back of his head, and flecks of gray matter all over the timber and paving stones. Hacking his lungs up in some filthy, dank cell. Blood like scarlet flowers in the murky dark. I saw him lined up against a wall, shot by a squad of soldiers, bullets tearing at his flesh and the fabric of his shirt."

"My God," muttered Courfeyrac, somewhat repulsed. "How macabre. Did you will these ideas into being? Did you not try to curb your thoughts?"

"I don't know exactly. It seemed involuntary, as if I had no control over what my mind wished me to see. But I must have willed the ideas into being, somehow, surely? It has happened quite a few times. Worse when I'm near him. I can be watching his face as he speaks and then, overlaying the man in front of me, I see another. The eyes lose that shining animation, and all that taut energy in every line of his body slackens, then stiffens, and it seems the rigor sets in, and the putrescence of the grave that is the very antithesis of his exquisite marble purity."

"Ugly, Grantaire. But clearly a manifestation of your concern for him. Or perhaps the DTs."

"But I've tried other fates for him as well. I have played out other destinies. I have tried to see him as a statesman at the helm of his Republic, with a daily round of meetings and undersecretaries and a wife and…"

"Oh, but this is better!" Courfeyrac interrupted enthusiastically, cuffing Grantaire on the shoulder. "Imagine a future for me too, please. A few terms as the people's representative would suit me nicely. I'll take Paris as my constituency. I'm not sure about the wife, though. Perhaps a mistress…"

"…Courfeyrac…"

"Or perhaps two? As long as they don't get jealous of each other, of course. I could keep them apart. Would three be excessive, do you think…?

"Courfeyrac, the point is, I can't see it. I try to imagine him old. I try to see the lines at the corners of his eyes – for surely he must have them, as if from looking into the sun too long. A tremor in his hands from a touch of arthritis. Children to bless him when he was gone. A grateful nation erecting a marble statue in his honor. Not of him in his youth of fine gold with passionate intensity, but the lion in his dotage with scrolls or books and sober, modest expression, surrounded by plump and sedate allegorical figures of commerce and industry." Grantaire paused, but Courfeyrac – looking ahead into the night – did not speak.

"But I cannot see it."

They walked on, Grantaire expectant. Courfeyrac had that magic line of connection to Enjolras that he lacked. His friend had a place in that circle, an easy confidence, a lack of awe. He could look at the things Grantaire saw, turn them around, and laugh at them, making the ugly shadows retreat.

And finally Courfeyrac did laugh. But it was forced and hard.

"Grantaire, you are too dark." Then his voice changed, and the words began to trip lightly. "All of us will probably suffer the misfortune to go on living. We will win our Republic. Feuilly will become envoy to Poland and marry a dazzling Greek woman of statuesque beauty. Prouvaire will write the preamble to the new Constitution and go on to edit a new journal, noted for its provocative articles and promotion of new poets. Bahorel shall oversee the newly reformed National Guard – he might want to look into a new name for them, too. Combeferre shall of course serve many terms in the Assembly, and shall found and be chancellor of a new university, the most advanced the world has yet seen, with a curriculum particularly strong in the sciences. Of course he shall have a big family, which shall assemble nightly with him in his parlor as he educates them on the practical applications of Boyle's law.

"I shall become positively rotund, replete with excellent food and wine as I argue with marvelous passion and great aplomb before the people's tribunal. And, of course, I shall have my three mistresses to juggle."

"And Enjolras?"

"Oh, he shall grow stout," Courfeyrac continued, but with less conviction. "All these functions, you know. No time for his singlesticks and shooting then. I think he'll loosen those chaste lips to sup of the vine more often as well. And develop a pate like Bossuet's (if I were a jealous man, Grantaire, I swear to you, those golden curls…). He shall carry on undaunted and uncompromising as a servant of the people, one of whom he shall take to wed. When he dies, it will be of gentle old age, and his deathbed will be surrounded by golden haired, blue-eyed children and grandchildren – "

Here he ceased abruptly and met Grantaire's eyes in the semigloom between the streetlights. The hollow words and empty image fell dead between them, melting as wax before the fiery reality of the man one followed, one worshiped, and both loved.

"He will never be old." Grantaire said flatly.

"I can't see it." Courfeyrac admitted grudgingly. "But that does not mean it may not come to pass." He put a hand on Grantaire's arm, suddenly fierce. "But remember this for all of us. If we fall, don't make a morbid memento mori of it – not preserved locks of hair and respectful reminiscences. If we are remembered at all, then let others turn to etchings of our portraits bordered with Phrygian caps on bayonets. But when you remember us - sitting with the new young men who shall fill the cafes when we are gone, drinking with those who take our place – if you remember us at all, then hang up your brightest colors and not mourning black."

Grantaire nodded. "I wish I could breath in the same rarefied air that you do. But it chokes me."

"Come," Courfeyrac smiled. "Dying is only one possibility. We may win, and the people may rise. And we may yet be transformed into those thoroughly respectable old men. Not quite so bourgeois as I have been imagining, though, I hope. In the meantime, cast off your mood. We could not have imagined an Enjolras, had he not been incarnate before us, so it is presumptuous to imagine his end. Let us go meet Nina – there is time yet before the theatre, and I'd like to try something other than that black ink they were serving tonight. Have you a recommendation?"

"Well, I do know of a place on the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais…"


End file.
